As some of you probably noticed, after 4 years of good service, I’ve decided to retire the cocoon-based blogging engine that powered this blog (codenamed linotype) and adopt somebody else’s code (WordPress).

When I first wrote Linotype, it had some unique and modern features, such as WYSIWYG in-browser editing and extensible metadata support, but the world caught up and surpassed it.

As soon as I was able to put my ego on the side and admit the above, the decision to migrate was relatively obvious: there is no reason for me to keep spending cycles on maintaining a software that has one user in the entire world (me), that doesn’t have any better feature than the blog engines already available as open source and with big development communities around them and that gives me a pluggable framework for a community (and myself) to add functionality to it.

But that got me thinking.

Unfortunately, not all migration decisions are that easy (even when ego is not involved): when do you know it’s better to stop pushing for a particular idea, technology, software, vision, give up, and change direction?

And what if the lack of traction is something that is ultimately depending on you and not on the environment around you?

There are uncountable examples of individuals achieving incredible success because of their perseverance and individuals achieving astonishing nothings because of their stubbornness. What is the difference?

And there are numerous examples of individuals abandoning a failing vision to succeed with the next or continue to quit them, unable to perceive the signs of growth.

Who’s standing on the shoulders of giants and who has giants on their shoulders?